KernelSpecification

Specifying kernels in the autotest web interface

Autotest has a system to expand Linux kernel versions to actually downloadable source trees, or even installable distro packages. At the moment, we support the following release schemas:

• Upstream versions. You can specify an upstream version, that will expand to an URL pointing to a tarball inside the kernel.org mirror you have specified. The script/library client/kernelexpand.py has this functionality implement, and lets you test it which versions can be actually expanded:

$ client/kernelexpand.py 3.2.1
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/linux-3.2.1.tar.bz2

We still don't allow you to specify an arbitrary distro package version for autotest to download, for example:

   $ client/kernelexpand.py 3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64
   Kernel '3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64' not found. Please verify if your version number is correct.

* Direct URLs pointing to rpm and deb packages containing the kernel. Example:

http://example.com/kernel-3.3.1.rpm
http://example.com/kernel-3.5-rc2.deb

Obviously, we'd like to cleanly support other ways of specifying kernels in the job creation interface, so this makes the complicated logic transparent to users, but we're not there yet. Please open an issue requesting for a given method and we'll consider it carefully.